If it went too far, it would destroy everything, including Alex himself.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Alex stood in the middle of the plaza, waiting for the pain to strike his brain, and the strange memories that didn’t fit with the real world to begin churning through his mind. He gazed intently at the old buildings that fronted on the plaza, searching for the unfamiliar details that he had expected to find in them. But nothing struck a chord. The buildings merely looked as they had always looked — a village hall that had once been a mission church, and a library that had once been a school.
No voices whispered in his head, and no pain racked his mind. It was all as it had been throughout his lifetime.
When he was at last certain that nothing in the plaza or the buildings around it was going to trigger something in his mind, he walked slowly into the library and approached the desk. Arlette Pringle, who had been librarian in La Paloma for thirty years, raised her brows reprovingly.
“Did someone declare a holiday without telling me, Alex?”
Alex shook his head. “I went to Mrs. Lewis’s funeral this morning. And this afternoon … well, there’s some things I need to look up, and the school library can’t help me.”
“I see.” Arlette Pringle tried to figure out whether Alex had just told her a very smooth lie — and after thirty years of dealing with the children of La Paloma as well as their parents, she thought she’d heard them all — or if he really was working on a school project and was here with the blessing of his teachers. Then she decided it really didn’t matter at all. So few of the kids came to the library anymore that a young face was welcome under any circumstances. “Can I help you find anything?”
“The town,” Alex said. “Are there any books about the history of La Paloma? I mean, all the way back, when the fathers first came?”
Arlette Pringle immediately nodded, and opened the locked case behind her desk. She pulled out a leather-bound volume and handed it to him. “If it’s the old history you’re after, this is it. But it was printed almost forty years ago. If you need anything more up-to-date, I’m afraid you’re out of luck.”
Alex glanced at the cover of the thin oversized book, then opened it to study the first page. Superimposed over an ink drawing of the plaza was the title: La Paloma: The Dove of the Peninsula. On the next page was a table of contents, and after scanning it, Alex knew he’d found what he was looking for. “Can I check this out?”
Miss Pringle shook her head. “I’m sorry, but it’s the only copy we have, and it can’t be replaced. I even made Cynthia Evans sit right here every time she had to refer to it for the hacienda.” When Alex looked puzzled, Arlette Pringle suddenly remembered what she’d been told about Alex’s memory. “For the restoration,” she went on. “In fact, after you read about it, you might want to go up to the Evanses’ and see what they’ve done. On the outside, at least, it’s exactly as it used to be.” The front door opened, and Arlette instinctively glanced toward it. “If you have any questions, I’ll be here,” she finished, then turned to the new arrival as Alex settled himself at one of the heavy oak tables that graced the single large room of the library.
The book, as he paged through it, proved to be primarily a collection of old pictures of the early days of La Paloma, accompanied by a sketchy narrative of the history of the town, beginning with the arrival of the Franciscan fathers in 1775, the Mexican land grants to the Californios in the 1820’s, and the effect of the Treaty of Hidalgo Guadalupe in 1848. An entire chapter dealt with the story of Roberto Meléndez y Ruiz, who was hanged after attempting to assassinate an American major general. After the hanging, his family abandoned their hacienda in the hills above La Paloma and fled back to Mexico, while the rest of the Californios quickly sold their homes to the Americans, and followed.
The rest of the book was devoted to detailed drawings of the mission, the hacienda, and the homes of the Californios. It was the drawings that commanded Alex’s attention.
There was page after page of floor plans and elevations of all the old houses that still stood in and around the village. For many of them, there were accompanying photographs as well, showing how the houses had been altered and modified over the years.
Near the end of the book, Alex found his own house, and stared at the old drawings for a long time. Little had changed over the years — of all the houses in La Paloma, the Lonsdales’ alone seemed to have survived in its original condition.
Except for the wall around the garden.
In the detailed drawings of the house that had been done by one of the priests shortly after the mission had lost its lands to the Californios, the patio wall was shown in great detail, complete with intricately tiled insets at regular intervals along its main expanse. Between the insets, set with equal precision, were small, well-clipped vines, espaliered on small trellises. Alex studied the picture carefully.
It was exactly as he had thought the wall should look when his parents had first brought him home from the Institute. But in the photograph of the same wall, taken forty-odd years ago, the vines had long since grown wild, covering the wall with a tangle of vegetation that completely obliterated the insets.
On the next page, he found Valerie Benson’s house. It bore little resemblance to what it had once been. Over the years, it had twice burned, and both times, during the rebuilding, walls had been moved and roof lines changed. The only thing that had not been altered beyond recognition was the patio, but even that had not completely survived the remodeling.
In 1927, a fishpond, fed by a waterfall, had been added.
Once again Alex studied the old drawing and the more recent photograph.
Once again it was the old drawing that looked right to him, that depicted the patio as he’d thought he remembered it only that morning.
He closed the book, and sat still for several minutes, trying to find an answer to the puzzle that was forming in his mind. At last he stood up and carried the volume over to Arlette Pringle’s desk. The librarian took it from him and carefully slid it back into its position in the locked cabinet behind her desk.
“Miss Pringle?” Alex asked. “Is there any way to tell when the last time I looked at that book was?”
Arlette Pringle pursed her lips. “Why, Alex, what on earth would you want to know that for?”
“I … well, I don’t remember so many things, but some of the things in that book look kind of familiar. And I just thought it might help if I could find out when the last time I looked at it was.”
“Well, I don’t know,” Miss Pringle mused, wondering if it was worth her while to dig through the old records of the locked cabinet. Then, remembering once more what had happened to Alex only a few months ago, she made up her mind. “Of course,” she said. “If it were in the open stacks, it would be impossible, but I keep records of every book that goes in and out of that cabinet. Lets have a look.” From the bottom drawer of her desk she took a thick ledger and began flipping through its pages. A minute later she smiled bleakly at Alex. “I’m sorry, Alex. According to my records, you’ve never seen that book before. In fact, nobody but Cynthia Evans has looked at it for the last five years, and before that, you and your friends were all so young I wouldn’t have let you touch it anyway.”
Alex frowned, then wordlessly turned and left the library. He walked home slowly, lost in thought. As he approached his house he finally made up his mind, and, though he was already tired, trudged on up Hacienda Drive.
He stopped once to rest, at the curve where only a few months ago his car had crashed through the safety barrier and plunged into the canyon below. He stayed there for nearly half an hour, searching his mind for memories of the crash.